04-30-2014, 10:56 AM
This is a long running game. It's been running for awhile, over 10 years I believe. When I joined around 2009, it was actually the first paid PBEM I played, though I only lasted 13 or so turns. It has a large focus on economic management, which for me, was its hook and ultimately partly the reason why I left. Controlling production, ferrying supplies, and managing economic logistics all to the purpose of eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate was great fun.
While I found the game enthralling I ended up dropping it for two reasons. What follows isn't an in depth review, but rather a novice's struggles with a PBM game.
First, the information management quickly became overwhelming. Information management is essential to the game, without it you can't manage your economy which means your empire will never succeed in its attempt at the stars. Now, I'm a mite OCD when it comes to information management, and developing a system for keeping track of all the minutiae of colonies, resources, ships, etc was an early goal of mind. As with most PBMs, information is presented in a tabular PDF format, that was clearly formatted for the old dot-matrix printer days. Each turn generated a mountain of data, but it was stuck in the useless PDF. There are a few existing player developed systems, spreadsheets, perl scripts, access databases. But none of them work really well, and for a newcomer their usage is completely opaque. As a programmer, I tried to develop my own tools. Since I didn't have an advanced position, and therefore didn't know about 90% of the game, my tool was basic. Every turn as I encountered new aspects of the game, I added to my tool in an iterative process. However it got to the point where I was spending more time writing this tool and trying to figure out how to model all sorts of unknowns, than playing the game. Now, that wouldn't have been altogether bad, I love programming and solving those sorts of problems, but the game moderators and community were largely indifferent to my attempts and struggles.
This brings me to the second and most important reason for why I dropped my SN position: the community is tiny, insular, and somewhat inactive. The forums are where the community congregates. Just look at the forum stats: it's almost a graveyard. Now, it should be noted that information is a sort of currency in this game, which is actually a meta-mechanic I really enjoyed. That is, the developers have kept most of the games tech trees and such secret, so as players advance, they learn and discover more about the game. The tech tree is expletive massive, so its likely, given enough turns, your position will discover a new technology that your enemy doesn't know about. This secrecy seems to be a driving force in player interaction, with alliances forming (formed?) to share information among each other. So, this play-and-find-out attitude combined with the general inactivity of the playerbase on the forums made for a very alienating and lonely experience as a beginner. Once again, I don't mean this to be a negative review for SN, rather, I view this as a character fault of my own.
In the end I was disappointed, for the game is very interesting, provides more than enough potential actions and avenues for progression that require lots of planning and strategizing, both aspects which are great for the 2 turns a month format. But, the information management requirement combined with the incredibly dated PDF format combined with the feeling that I was playing alone in a desert island just didn't justify the continued expense.
Does anyone else have any experience with this game?
While I found the game enthralling I ended up dropping it for two reasons. What follows isn't an in depth review, but rather a novice's struggles with a PBM game.
First, the information management quickly became overwhelming. Information management is essential to the game, without it you can't manage your economy which means your empire will never succeed in its attempt at the stars. Now, I'm a mite OCD when it comes to information management, and developing a system for keeping track of all the minutiae of colonies, resources, ships, etc was an early goal of mind. As with most PBMs, information is presented in a tabular PDF format, that was clearly formatted for the old dot-matrix printer days. Each turn generated a mountain of data, but it was stuck in the useless PDF. There are a few existing player developed systems, spreadsheets, perl scripts, access databases. But none of them work really well, and for a newcomer their usage is completely opaque. As a programmer, I tried to develop my own tools. Since I didn't have an advanced position, and therefore didn't know about 90% of the game, my tool was basic. Every turn as I encountered new aspects of the game, I added to my tool in an iterative process. However it got to the point where I was spending more time writing this tool and trying to figure out how to model all sorts of unknowns, than playing the game. Now, that wouldn't have been altogether bad, I love programming and solving those sorts of problems, but the game moderators and community were largely indifferent to my attempts and struggles.
This brings me to the second and most important reason for why I dropped my SN position: the community is tiny, insular, and somewhat inactive. The forums are where the community congregates. Just look at the forum stats: it's almost a graveyard. Now, it should be noted that information is a sort of currency in this game, which is actually a meta-mechanic I really enjoyed. That is, the developers have kept most of the games tech trees and such secret, so as players advance, they learn and discover more about the game. The tech tree is expletive massive, so its likely, given enough turns, your position will discover a new technology that your enemy doesn't know about. This secrecy seems to be a driving force in player interaction, with alliances forming (formed?) to share information among each other. So, this play-and-find-out attitude combined with the general inactivity of the playerbase on the forums made for a very alienating and lonely experience as a beginner. Once again, I don't mean this to be a negative review for SN, rather, I view this as a character fault of my own.
In the end I was disappointed, for the game is very interesting, provides more than enough potential actions and avenues for progression that require lots of planning and strategizing, both aspects which are great for the 2 turns a month format. But, the information management requirement combined with the incredibly dated PDF format combined with the feeling that I was playing alone in a desert island just didn't justify the continued expense.
Does anyone else have any experience with this game?